Posts in the Personal Category

The weeklong break is over.  Now I start a weekend break.  Meanwhile, a few things that flitted across my radar while I was away:

• Please, for the love of all that’s holy, patch your Windows boxes!  Like Zeldman and Kurtz, I too have had an e-mail address filled into forged e-mail headers, and been hit with bounces galore.  Hopefully this will all soon become a lesser problem with a change in server, but still—patch those leaky systems!  Now!
• Some interesting quotes from and commentary on Weaving the Web.
• Thanks to a post by Mark Pilgrim, “‘Considered Harmful’ Essays Considered Harmful” is getting some traffic.  This amuses me.
• Hell yeah.  I’m behind George 100% on pretty much every point he makes, and I’ll just add that we’re a major airline hub so finding reasonably priced flights to just about anywhere is a snap.  ‘Nuff said.

That’s it for the moment, but I hope to have a new site and some new content to share with you on Monday.

• Ketchup was published on Saturday, August 23rd, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Cleveland, Standards, and Writing categories.
• There have been no replies.

Everyone complains about Jakob Neilsen’s site design, but nobody ever does anything about it—until now.  Bob Sawyer has announced a “redesign useit.com” contest that’s being held with the blessing of Dr. Neilsen himself.  Dare we call it Designer’s Eye For the Usable Guy?  The contest closes at the end of October, so you have some time to really do a great job.

The trends described in the Time article “Believe It, Or Not” bother me quite a bit.  The last paragraph in particular seems chilling to me.  I’ve no objection to religion, as long as it isn’t being shoved in my face, and frankly I think more people could use a strong moral/ethical core.  It’s the decline in intellectualism and critical thinking, and the view that one can’t be moral without a belief in God, that trouble me deeply.  I can say with absolute certainty the latter is patently false, unless one defines morality to be solely derived from religious teachings, in which case either the term needs to be expanded or we need to ask a different question.  For example: “Is it necessary to believe in God to be an ethical person?  A good person?”

As I looked at this and the last several entries, I see that most of my recent posting has been personal in nature.  The CSS has fallen more or less by the wayside, which also bothers me.  I’m going to take a week off and think about the balance or technical content versus personal commentary, and how I want this site to evolve as I move forward with the consulting business.

• Grand Designs was published on Saturday, August 16th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Culture categories.
• There have been no replies.

Our power came back on about 8:00am EDT, sixteen or so hours after it failed.  Not everyone is back online.  Portions of Detroit may be out until Sunday, and I’ve gotten word that parts of New York City are still offline even as I write this.  As an example, Jeff and Carrie Zeldman are still blacked out, so try to go easy on the e-mail for a while.

There was a flutter in the power before it went out yesterday that was kind of fascinating.  I heard a low surging sound, repeated five or six times, coming through the speakers on my computer; it sounded very much like an old cassette tape warble, except I could see the power was fading in and out on the speaker set.  My biggest concern at that moment was that my speakers were getting ready to short out.  As it turned out, the entire power system shorted out instead.  I was hearing the death rattle of a multi-state power grid, and didn’t realize it until later.

As for Kat and me, things went fairly well.  I had the new TiBook to work on, and although I was cut off from a lot of the files I needed I still got some work done.  We cook with gas, so we were able to make dinner by flashlight and eat by candlelight, which is never a bad thing.  Since close to the entire city was blacked out until this morning, the clear weather last night made it a perfect chance to stargaze and get a good look at Mars.  I spotted the Milky Way faintly through the summer haze, and the across-the-street neighbors had a fairly powerful telescope, so we checked out Mars and the Moon, then sat in the moonlight chatting.  All in all, the evening could have been worse spent.

• Between Darkness and Light was published on Friday, August 15th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

I just found out that Joshua Davis will be in town tonight, and I’m not going to be able to make it.  So the rest of you local types need to get down there and attend!  Even if you don’t use Flash, as in fact I don’t, Josh is a great speaker and you’ll have a lot of fun, so hurry up and RSVP.  The entrance fee may be a bit of a deterrent, but trust me, if you have the cash to spare it will be well invested… if for no other reason than getting a chance to look at Josh’s extensive tattoos.

I don’t know how your day has been, but I learned something about myself this morning.  There’s an online CSS-centric forum that I frequently read—actually, there are several that I read, popping up every now and again to post, but there’s this one I have in mind.  My last few posts there have gone basically unacknowledged, despite the fact that my posts were (I think) detailed and helpful.  Of course, I didn’t post them to generate worship, but these didn’t even get so much as a “thank you” or “that worked.”  I posted, and then it was crickets.  Other threads were continuing, so I knew the community was still in some sense active.

So as I made my morning rounds of various weblogs, forums, mailing lists, newsgroups, and so forth, I thought to myself, “You know what?  I’m not going there any more.  I don’t have time to help out people who don’t even acknowledge that I tried to help out.”  Childish and petty, I suppose, but that’s what I thought.  Then, several minutes later, I found myself headed to the very place I’d resolved to abandon, because I wondered if there would be any interesting posts, anyone looking for help that I could provide.  I realized that providing assistance was more important than any wounded feelings I might have.

So what I learned is that I can be petty, but that the pettiness gets trumped by other, stronger motivations.  I think that’s a good balance to have in my life.  It may be the key to thickening one’s skin, which is another necessary trait, particularly online.

• Pray Tell was published on Tuesday, August 12th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Remember I mentioned the “ZARGON” license plate?  Gail Cohen wrote me from Miami, Florida to tell me whose car that was.  His name’s Rex.  I’ve talked about moments of technological vertigo (technovertigo? technologigo?  technigo?) in the past.  This is another such moment.

So apparently Gail and Rex are both members of the International Association of Haunted Attractions, and his hobby is being an interactive actor in haunted houses.  You know the guys who jump out at you with goalie masks and chain saws?  He’s one of them.  Oh, heck, take a look for yourself.  So it turns out that terror really is his business, at least as a hobby, and I suppose it does take guts.  Just not the kind I meant.

• Spooky! was published on Saturday, August 9th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Technovertigo category.
• There have been no replies.

Fresh from a Taiwanese factory and several FedEx planes, I now have in my claws a brand-spankin’ new 1GHz 15.2″ TiBook.  Ahhhhh…. except for it running OS X, which I still don’t really quite understand.  Thanks to Mac OS X Hacks, I quickly located the terminal window and added it to the Dock for handy access.  <mood type="bliss"/>  I even got the built-in AirPort option even though I don’t have WiFi in the house.  So, of course, I’m in the market for a wireless access point.  Anyone have suggestions for a good one?  Bear in mind the access point will be situated inside a lath-and-plaster house, which may mean a whole lot of metal wire mesh in the walls.  Then again, the house was built in 1920, so I don’t know for sure that they were using much metal in walls back then.

Also bear in mind that I didn’t buy an Airport base station because I didn’t want to spend that much on a wireless extension to my existing wired network.  I’ve been looking at the LinkSys WAP11, as I have a LinkSys router already and the price is right, but I’ve been reading online that its range is limited and I want to cover three floors of the house, plus the front and back yards.  As long as I can good signal at a fifty-foot range from the station, and moderate signal up to one hundred feet, I’ll be more than fine.  I found a how-to on hacking the WAP11 to boost its transmission power, but I don’t know if the current firmware still allows the hack.  What does sort of bother me is that the WAP11 won’t pass through AppleTalk packets.  It’s not that I do tons of AppleTalk, but that it bothers me buying an access point that absolutely slams that door shut.  I will want to communicate between my Classic OS desktop and the TiBook, obviously.

Anyway—have need for wireless access point, need to cover multistory house, will want Mac-to-Mac communication, looking for recommendations.  The more plug-and-play, the better.  Meantime, I have to figure out how to best go about repartioning the hard drive into my usual triad of boot volume, data volume, and scratch-space volume.  And then I have to come up with a catchy name for this beast.  Oh, the crosses I bear.

Somehow I missed the fact that Opera Journal published a short interview with me on Tuesday and Wednesday.  You should probably start with part one, and then follow it to part two.  I think it got broken up because I spent some time answering the first question, but it really is short—five questions, if I counted correctly.  But not a Friday Five.

• All Tied Up was published on Friday, August 8th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Mac categories.
• There have been no replies.

Just to demonstrate that my brain has melted, I’m actually thinking about adding a “Plate Watch” box to the site sidebar.  On my way back home this afternoon, I found myself situated behind an SUV whose license plate read “ICU PEKN.”  I was impressed.  It isn’t often you see reverse psychology employed on a license plate.

The business side of life seems to be jumpin’, as they would have said back in the Big Band era.  Besides the work for Macromedia, I have one confirmed CSS training contract and three possibles, plus what looks like three conferences between now and Thanksgiving.  I’m also hoping to sign in the next week a few more contracts to do standards optimization and strategy work for various companies.  All that, plus I’m trying to assemble a business site for myself and create or acquire the materials that are so vital to being on one’s own.

Considered in this context, I suppose the persistent light insomnia is a bit of a blessing in disguise.  Still, I’ve no cause to complain.  I think I almost had to go out on my own at some point, just to find out if I can hack it.  If so, great!  If not, then I’ll know that I tried.

At any rate, the heavy work load does make for light journal entries.

• Plated was published on Thursday, August 7th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Consulting and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.

I have in my possession the separation package AOLTW is offering me.  It came in one of those paper-cardboard navy blue Oxford pocket folders I used to store all my class notes back in junior high school, at least for the classes that didn’t require a lot of note-taking.  Like art class.  There isn’t a whole lot to these agreements.  I go that way, they go another way, they help tide over the transition period, I agree to certain things, blah blah blah.  This is actually new to me, as it’s the first time I’ve left a position without resigning.

Anyway, the point is that when I pulled out the documents, I discovered something else in the folder.   A little bonus parting gift from a former employer, as it were.  Just their way of saying thanks for all the work I’d done over the past couple of years.  I almost fell out of my chair laughing.

Ah irony, thou cruel and playful mistress.  Why do I love thee so?

You’d think they could have sent along a bunch of them for me to use.  Like, six or maybe eight of them.  You know?

• Disc Slippage was published on Monday, August 4th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.